The United States of America has created two constitutions. The first was the Articles of Confederation, a confederacy of 13 states. Why a confederacy? Colonial life under a tyrannical, all-powerful, monarchy inured the Founding Fathers against a strong central government.
The Confederacy was a failure. It had little authority and no facility to balance the aggregate needs of the sovereign 13 states.
Our Founding Fathers were scholars who studied the histories of governments. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay published essays that would become known as the Federalist Papers. Those essays advocated for a federal constitution, which was ratified in 1789.
The Constitution of 1789 requires a republican form of government for all states. Learn more from Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution. The word republic comes from the Latin phrase res publica, “the people’s thing.”
The first ten amendments to the Constitution are known as “The Bill of Rights.” The highest duty of all governments is to uphold an enduring principle unpinning this Constitution. This principle appears in the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Two articles of the Constitution limit the powers of the federal government. Article 1, Section 8 enumerates the 17 areas of federal government. The 10th Amendment demarcates the limited powers of the federal government from the essentially unlimited powers of the state governments.
The 10th Amendment stipulates, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.“
From the beginning of the United States of America, a contravention existed. The Bill of Rights contravened the reality of slave labor.
Out of this contravention, a new political party was birthed. The Republican Party arose in opposition to the expansion of slavery into the new western territories. Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president. Here is a part of a speech by the Republican candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.“
Ronald Reagan preserved that pro-freedom ideal for all people. Reagan stated, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.“
God bless America.
John N. White 